Detailed views of the Amazon rainforest, its rivers, and indigenous communities are the latest additions to Google's "Street View" collection, the company announced this week. The imagery — captured while boating down 500 kilometers of rivers, walking along 20 kilometers of trails, and ziplining through dense forest — reveals stunning views of the Amazon from the top of its canopy to the forest floor. The photos also capture daily life in 17 communities of local people who live deep within the rainforest and along the Rio Mariepauá, one of the Amazon River's largest tributaries. To capture images of a particularly isolated part of the forest, the project used a custom-built camera called a Trekker, which snaps photos as it moves through the canopy on a zip line. The images were collected in partnership with the conservation organization Amazonas Sustainable Foundation, which hopes that sharing in-depth photographs of the area will help promote conservation efforts.

Observers are lining up to credit the weekly satirical news show HBO’s Last Week Tonight and its acerbic host John Oliver with reversing the Federal Communications Commission’s decision on net neutrality. So I watched with interest as the show turned its gaze to the topic of the nation’s crumbling infrastructure: our dams and dikes, ports and pipes, roads and rails.

What if you could find a way to think like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, or Richard Branson? What if you discovered the actual thought processes that lead great innovators to their Eureka moments, and then you reverse-engineered them? What if you built a power tool for creative thinking that would enable you to emulate the mind of the innovator?

The energy shift in the world is now inevitable. To sustain life and livelihoods for 9 billion people by 2050, even if we didn’t count on living well (which we do, of course), we have 35 years to transform the global economy in order to decouple economic growth from high-emissions energy use. Phasing out emissions, especially those from carbon (CO2) - the primary cause of warming today - has to be a priority for business, as well as governments.

One of the most effective arguments against electric cars right now is their high cost compared to conventional vehicles. Without the $7,500 tax rebate, a Nissan LEAF costs nearly $30,000, making it one of the most expensive compact cars you can buy…and that’s for the base model. But what happens if electric cars actually endRead More

Back in the days before the burst money bubble of 2008 it seemed like community gardening and environmental projects in the voluntary sector could access all sorts of funding, and indeed many did. Times were good for gardening and environmental projects, funding was fairly easy to acquire and it was regular. On the other side of the the burst money bubble there is still funding about but the need for services and resources is much greater than it has ever been due to the shock and trauma caused by the credit crunch, and subsequent efforts to support and prop up a crooked and greedy banking sector that caused it. There is a huge need in terms of access to cleanly grown fresh food in the UK. Food banks gave out over one million food parcels in 2014 which was followed by a proliferation of newer food banks opening up all over the country. When this is combined with thousands of people being sanctioned by the DWP on a weekly basis and millions pushed into working poverty by zero contract employment, and the constantly rising price of fresh food the situation is a lot worse than any of the media dare to admit. This is where newer thinking and ways of doing things come in, and in particular Permaculture.

There’s an interesting conversation happening in urbanism circles about how to make transit financially sustainable, going back to a piece in CityLab last June from University of Minnesota professor David Levinson. Levinson made the case for running transit like a public utility, not a government agency.

If ever there was an auspicious moment in performance measurement and reporting, this is surely it. Multicapitalism has arrived! The shortcomings of conventional accounting have been readily apparent for years: Its inability to account for the full market value of a company or the total cost of its social and environmental impacts. Signs that (mono)capitalism would give way to multicapitalism have been mounting as well.

Flora Moon's insight:

One of my clients uses monetization of non-traditional capital. I have worried about her trade-off discussions because money is not a good proxy for true weighting and offsetting of impacts. I think the MultiCapital Scorecard concept is very useful...This article summarizes and contrasts the different approaches well.

A sea of glass panels may soon be sprawling across a paddock in Queensland’s Darling Downs cranking out two gigawatts of energy – 100 times more than the largest solar farm in Australia today – and a former top flight barrister is the unusual shining light behind its development

Switzerland announced its post-2020 climate action plan yesterday, making it the first country to officially submit its contribution to the international climate agreement to be finalized in Paris at the end of this year. It's a promising start, with the country committing to reduce its emissions 50 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.

Absent any foreseeable action from Washington, some states and localities are stepping up with policies that put a price on carbon. And that has a number of exciting implications for cities and sustainable transportation. California is using revenue from its cap-and-trade program, for instance, to subsidize housing near transit.

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